MT140 Unit 2 Management Functions Analysis Example

Two Desks Assign the Same Retake: A Unit 2 Management Functions Analysis at a School Portrait Company

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Purdue University Global

MT140: Introduction to Management

Unit 2 Management Functions Analysis

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[Date]

Larkspur School Portraits, its staff and every figure are composite and illustrative; the sources cited are real.

The Organization and the Symptom

Larkspur School Portraits photographs about 210 schools across central Indiana each fall. After each picture day, families have about three weeks to request a retake, and the company returns to each school for one retake day. In October, the busiest month, a customer service team of eight takes retake requests by phone and online form, and a two-person field scheduling desk books photographers and retake days.

The symptom is simple to state. In the last two Octobers, families at about one school in eight reported that a child they had signed up for a retake was not on the photographer's list. The company also sent a photographer to two schools on days when the school had already rescheduled. Both figures are estimates from the complaint log, since the company does not track lost retakes directly.

The Four Functions

Robbins and Coulter (2021) describe management as four functions: planning, which sets goals and strategies; organizing, which arranges work and assigns responsibility; leading, which directs and motivates people; and controlling, the function that compares results with targets and steps in when they drift.

Planning is working. The retake calendar is set in August, and every school knows its retake week before picture day. The evidence is that no school in the past two years has complained about not knowing its retake window.

Leading is strained but holding. The customer service manager spends October answering phones herself instead of coaching her team, which slows training for seasonal staff. But morale surveys from last fall were reasonable, and turnover among permanent staff is low.

Controlling works on paper. Both desks track their own volume, calls answered and retake days booked, and those numbers look healthy every week. What nobody measures is whether a requested retake actually happened, so the control system watches activity, not results.

The weekly report the owner reads is a good example. It shows calls answered within two minutes, average call length, retake days booked and photographer days used. Each figure is accurate, and each describes a desk doing its job. None of them describes a family whose child was photographed on retake day. The report was designed when retakes were handled by a single scheduler, years before the online request form existed, and it never changed when the work split between two desks.

Organizing is failing. Customer service takes the retake request and enters it in the order system. The scheduling desk builds the photographer's retake list from the school's own sign-up sheet, which it emails to the school a week before. When a family requests a retake online and the school's sheet does not include the child, the child is missed. When a school changes the retake date with the scheduling desk but a parent calls customer service, the family is told the old date. Two desks hold half of the same job.

The cost of that gap is larger than the complaint count suggests. A missed retake usually means a second trip to the school, since principals will not accept a family being turned away. Each extra trip takes a photographer team for half a day in the busiest month, which pushes other schools later. It also lands on the customer service team as angry calls, which lengthen the queue for everyone else. In this sense the organizing failure shows up in every other function: it creates overtime that planning did not expect, it drains the manager's time away from coaching, and it produces complaints that the control reports never anticipated.

Why Organizing Is the Root

The strongest test is to imagine fixing each function in turn. If planning improved further, retake calendars would be set earlier, but the lists would still be built from two sources. If leading improved and the manager coached more, the team would be faster, but no one would own the merged list. If controlling measured completed retakes, the company would see the problem sooner, but it would still occur. Only a change in organizing, giving one desk ownership of the retake list from request to photograph, removes the cause.

Galbraith (1974) argues that as the information an organization must process grows, it needs structures that either reduce the need for coordination or increase its capacity to coordinate. In October, retake information comes from families, schools and photographers at once, and Larkspur has added volume without assigning anyone to coordinate it. The two desks are each doing their part correctly. The gap is between them.

One objection deserves an answer. The customer service manager argues that her team simply needs more training on the retake process, which would make this a leading problem. Training would help at the margin, but it cannot fix a design in which two lists exist and nobody is assigned to reconcile them. A well-trained representative who enters a request perfectly still has no way to know whether the school's sign-up sheet includes the same child. The fault sits in how the work is divided, which is the definition of organizing.

Each desk did its own job well; the job that fell through was the one nobody had been given.

Recommendation

The company should make the field scheduling desk the single owner of every retake list. Customer service would continue to take requests, but each request would go into a shared retake queue that the scheduling desk reconciles against the school's sheet three days before the retake day, calling the school about any child on one list and not the other. Date changes would be entered only by the scheduling desk, and customer service would read the date from the same queue.

Fayol (1949) listed unity of command, each employee taking orders from one superior, among his principles, and a related idea applies here: each task should have one owner. The owner can judge the change by two figures: the number of complaints about missed retakes per school, and the number of wasted photographer trips. Both should fall in the first October after the change.

The change is cheap. It needs no new staff, only a shared queue in the order system the company already uses and about four hours of training for both desks in September. The scheduling desk will carry more work in October, roughly one extra hour a day for reconciliation, but it will save the far larger time now spent arranging second trips and answering complaints about missed children.

References

Fayol, H. (1949). General and industrial management (C. Storrs, Trans.). Pitman. (Original work published 1916)

Galbraith, J. R. (1974). Organization design: An information processing view. Interfaces, 4(3), 28-36. https://doi.org/10.1287/inte.4.3.28

Robbins, S. P., & Coulter, M. (2021). Management (15th ed.). Pearson.